I'm looking forward to trying 3.2. It's in the Arch repos already so will be testing tonight after work. Gnome 3 is running nicely and is quite stable for a first relaese but it isn't without it's quirks.

Almost two weeks with Gnome 3.2 on Arch now and I must say it's great. It's stable with not one crash experienced. It feels quicker and more polished than 3. Also, it's easily tweaked and extensive so you can experience true functionality and theme beauty. When compared with the early kde 4 releases, gnome is streets ahead of where kde were in terms of stabilty and speed.

In terms of usability, gnome 3 is a grower. It takes time to understand but given time it grows on you and the new actions start to become quite natural. I actually think my productivity has increased. Also when going back to a traditional type DE, the old way feels a bit tired and dated whereas the shell feels fresh and new.

I urge those wishing to give it a trial to do so for a reasonable length of time. Don't listen to the haters and open your mind and formulate your own opinion. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Sorry to come over all fanboyish but I think gnome has taken a bit of a battering of late but I think I understand their way of thinking now.

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I've just joined the band of haters, only temporarily. Because Gnome 3's ripple effects are visible in Ubuntu's latest-n-greatest

I can't theme anything. Now, I'm downloading Gnome Tweaks from Ubuntu's Software Center. I specifically need to replace white everywhere with gray to avoid eye strain. That's about all the theme-ing I need to do.

But I'll be reading up a bit more on Gnome 3. In the meantime, I came across this:

The developers argue that users should generally suspend their computers instead of shutting down. In order to encourage that pattern of behavior, they hid the shutdown and restart menu items. By default, shutdown will not be displayed and the restart option will only appear when you have system updates that need to be applied. Team GNOME apparently forgot that some people dual-boot or occasionally need to replace laptop batteries.

Hold the Alt key and suspend will change to shutdown. The option is there, its just not default, so Gnome have not forgotten that people need to shutdown.

Cheers, Nick.

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That was described in the next para:

Users can override this behavior and get the shutdown menu option to show up by holding the alt key when they click the menu. The keyboard modifier is not even remotely discoverable and will leave many users feeling confused when they try to turn off their computer. I had no idea that it existed until I asked on Twitter. During my Fedora 15 testing, I had to shut down the computer by first logging out of GNOME 3.0 and then using the shutdown feature in the login greeter.

"Having all of the keys in a single compact binary format also avoids the intense fragmentation problems currently experienced by the tree-of-directories-of-xml-files approach." Hell yes, you read correctly : dconf will be using a single binary file … We just reinvent Windows registry. If really dconf is going to hold all the settings in one binary file, we are going to have a single point of failure.

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Italics and quote marks added by me for clarity

And, yes, I know it's from 2009 but it seems to have made its appearance if this critique (or rant) is correct:

The worst, though, is that .config/dconf/user file. One can haggle back and forth about esthetics, and argue that my judgment about what end-users want may be faulty. But burying my configuration inside an opaque binary blob – that is unforgivably stupid and bad engineering. How did forty years of Unix heritage comes to this? It’s worse than the Windows registry, and perpetrated by people who have absolutely no excuse for not knowing better.

GNOME 3, as of right now, does not let you change the default theme using a GUI option because they want a standard visual identity for GNOME 3, sort of how everybody knows a Windows or Mac desktop just by looking at it because of their strong visual identities. In addition to that, the designers and developers figured that it’s better to care about getting the fundamentals done right first, and allowing for more superficial concerns such as theming later.